A compelling heist-thriller-love story that readers will race through.
When an unpaid Wall Street intern at a Manhattan investment bank discovers there is $10 million in cash ready to pay kidnappers stored in a basement vault, she decides to fake a kidnapping.
Faye Walker had a very normal suburban life as a child, complete with a backyard trampoline and two loving parents, until her mother passed away when she was 11. Her father descended into drugs, lost his job and the house, then sent Faye and her sister, Caitlin, to live with their grandmother in her trailer in Kentucky coal country before finally landing in prison. Through sheer hard work, an innate talent for math, and a fortuitous decision to actually listen to advice given to her, Faye turns a personal downward spiral in high school into a full ride for a BA and MBA before finally landing the coveted summer internship in Manhattan. She is positive her hard work will land her one of the two full-time junior investment analyst positions that will be announced when the internship ends. And with the addition of finding her one true love in NYC, an Irish taxi driver who wants to become a first responder, she feels like the world is finally turning out as it should. But when she discovers that she doesn’t have a chance of getting one of the jobs, she cooks up a fake kidnapping scheme to cheat the company out of the cash it keeps on hand in the event one of its clients needs immediate access to ransom money. But when her partner, a rich son turned drug addict, turns up unexpectedly dead, her careful plans begin to unravel, and she is left trying to survive. An unexpected twist at the end caps this exciting jaunt, which is heavy on specific details of Faye’s chess-move planned heist, though thin on why she decides it is her only option.
A compelling heist-thriller-love story that readers will race through.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781335455086
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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